Quotations About Place That Nurture Transformation

photo by Maria Scordialos

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“We make energy connections at sacred sites, like tuning in a radio, by concentrating your awareness, quieting your mind and tuning your entire being to the “energy broadcast” of the power point.”
~ Martin Gray, “Sacred Sites and Power Points”

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“Wholeness is a structure. It is not mere ‘intuition’. It is not nebulous. It is a structure lying at such a deep level, that we cannot easily describe it in feet and inches, or centimeters and millimeters. In short, the point by point description will not capture it.”
~ Christopher Alexander, Nature of Order: Luminous Ground

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“To describe a sacred spot, we are forced to use encoded language. (e.g. Mt. Shasta is a mountain, a particular mountain that looks like a hovering ghost over the landscape, a benevolent presence, epitomizes “mountainness,” simply a large mass of rock, etc.) Be aware that the very language we use forms our “grasp” of the place. Be open to unspoken metaphors.”
~ Adrian J. Ivakjhiv, Claiming Sacred Ground

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“Many of the tribal peoples of the world recognize that there are four places in nature where you can find deep peace and remember who you really are. One is in the deep woods; one is in the desert; one in the mountains and one near the ocean ”
~ Angeles Arrien, “The Second Half of Life” transcript

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“...we have not had an adequate way of depicting in our minds what, in general, wholeness is like and how it might be depicted .”
~ Christopher Alexander, Nature of Order, Luminous Ground

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“If we want to make the imagination feel at home, generosity shows us the way. How else can imagination thrive but in a place where welcoming comes first and where judgment feels no need to speak and finally feels no need to be?”
~ Sarah Wider, Emerson scholar

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“Sacred places are physical and geographic anchor points for our psychic and cultural imaginings, the stories we tell about ourselves, the world, and the relations between them.”
~Adrian J. Ivakhiv, Claiming Sacred Ground

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“We do not live in space. Instead we live in places. So it behooves us to understand what such place-bound and place-specific living consists in. However lost we may become by gliding rapidly between places, however oblivious to place we may be in our thought and theory, and however much we may prefer to think of what happens in a place rather than of the place itself, we are tied to place undetatchably and without reprieve.”
~Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place

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“Is there a spiritual geography, are there certain places upon the earth which are more or less attuned to certain modes of consciousness? And if so, do such qualities belong to the earth itself, to certain qualities of light, or sound, or scent or rock formation?…or do people of a certain cast of mind impart to the land their own qualities?”
~Kathleen Raine, The Lion’s Mouth

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“Tell me the landscape in which you live and I will tell you who you are.”
~José Ortega y Gasset

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“An individual is not distinct from his place; he is that place.”
~Gabriel Marcel

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“To be is to be in place.”
~Aristotle

“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”
~Simone Weil, The Need for Roots

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“We continue to displace ourselves—no longer with unity of direction, like a migrant flock, but more like the refugees from a broken ant hill.”
~Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America

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“Whether we go to the Ganges or Graceland, maintaining a spirit of observance and self-reflection is key.”
~Gregg Levoy, Callings

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“For Africa to me... is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.”
~Maya Angelou

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“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
~Henry David Thoreau, Walden

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“The search may begin with a restless feeling, as if one were being watched. One turns in all directions and sees nothing. Yet one senses that there is a source for this deep restlessness, and the path that leads there is not a path to a strange place, but the path home. (‘But you are home,’ cries the Witch of the North. ‘All you have to do is wake up.’)”
~Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard

“Sacred places in nature are the places where Indian people find health, beauty, balance, peace, meaning and love.”
~William Fields

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“The pilgrim travels to the sacred site, undergoes difficult experiences—loss, sacrifice (of whatever needs to be “released”), an initiatory, symbolic death—in order to be reborn and remade, healed and made whole.”
~Adrian J. Ivakhiv, Claiming Sacred Ground

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“Truth has many faces and the truth is like to the old road to Avalon; it depends on your own will and your own thoughts, wither the road will take you.”
~Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon

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“It isn’t about place. It’s about response. The place is just a setting, a trigger that helps begin an inner process.”
~Rob White, “Sacred Places”

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“In the garden we practice letting thoughts, ideas, preferences, desires, even loves, both live and die. We plant, we pull, we bury. We dry seed, sow it, support it…In the garden one can see the time coming for both fruition and for dying back. In the garden one is moving with rather than against the inhalations and the exhalations of greater wild Nature.” ~Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

“When you find your place where you are, practice occurs.”
~Dogen